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GABBLER RECOMMENDS: The Flowering Wand by Sophie Strand

Posted on November 6, 2023November 9, 2023 by blablablaandgabbler

Quotes from The Flowering Wand we liked:

“How can a monotheistic sky god rule the dirt, the fungi, the funky and sexy reality of embodied life if he is always hovering above it? How can he understand the millions of different stories that constitute an eco-system if he insists there is only one story and one god?

Monotheism is trapped by its attachment to a mythic monologue. Sky gods think sunshine, abstraction, and ascension are the answer to everything. But the problem with the sun is that if it isn’t tempered by darkness and rain and decay, it tends to create deserts instead of biodiverse ecosystems. We are ground people who have been worshiping sky stories not properly suited to our relational existence rooted in the land. Sporulated storm gods come from the ground, like us, so they understand our soil-fed, rain-sweetened existence. They bring the wisdom of the underworld and lift it into the sky, only to pour it back into the leaves, the grasses, the valleys, soaking back into the dirt from which they originally emerged. Sky gods encourage linear thinking. Spore gods teach us that everything is cyclical. Yes, sometimes we must ascend like a spore on the wind, but it is also important to descend back into our bodies and back into the earth.” – pg 13

“Who is the monster of today’s legends? Today, we see a surfeit of media coverage devoted to weather and climate events. Has the biosphere become the monster? Every attempt to create weather- or climate-regulating technology, rather than adjusting and halting our won abysmal behaviors, posits Earth as monster and human kind as the ‘heroes’ who must control her and tame her and save her. Technonarcissists are the new Marduk. The new Theseus. They want the myth of progress to subsume the older (although newly investigated in the realms of quantum physics and glacial ice coring) chaos of emergent systems and biospheric intelligence. Earth doesn’t know best, our cultures insist. We know best. And we must progress ever onward toward greater control.” -pg 27

“The alternative to patriarchy and sky gods is not equal and opposite. It is not a patriarchy with a woman seated on a throne. The Sacred Masculine isn’t a horned warrior bowing down to his impassive empress. The divine, although it includes us, is mostly inhuman. Mutable. Mostly green. Often microscopic. And it is everything in between. Interstitial and relational. The light and the dark. Moonlight on moving water. The lunar bowl where we all mix and love and change.” -pg 33

“We are all increasingly strangers in the home of our own bodies: taught to ignore our subtle appetites and changing needs, taught to medicate symptoms rather than curiously inquiring into root causes. WE blast our microbiomes with antibiotics and spray away the natural pheromones that once carefully attuned us to choosing the right sexual mates. People with wombs are told that their menstruation needs to be treated with medication as if it were a disease. Food is seen as fuel, not sacrament. We treat our bodies like vehicles we can drive into the ground and then replace. We work hard to abstract our minds from our most sacred physical hearths.” -pg 34

“Emergent systems are characterized as systems that work as an assemblage of different entities. They represent the moment when chaos coalesces into synchronized, the relational patterns of a complexity that is utterly unpredictable. Examples are the murmurations of starlings, tornadoes, and fish schooling. Dionysus never shows up alone. He always has plants, leopards, lions, women, satyrs, or goats in tow. He is covered in snakes and vines. His whole presence shimmers and flickers: between genders, between species, between new and old, between known and unknown” -pg 39

“What was so shocking about the maenads? Euripides describes them with long loose hair, unbound and uncovered by a veil. They tamed wild animals and wore crowns fashioned of thrones and serpents. They were draped in fawn and leopard skins, symbolic attributes of the ancient Bronze Age nature goddess Cybele, and the wielded Dionysus’s fennel thyrsus. They danced and sang and rant through the groves. They drank wine and hunted wild animals with superhuman agility and strength. They ate raw flesh, a practice demonized by ‘civilized’ Rome and then the patriarchal sterility of modern academia. But it seems obvious that this rite of flesh eating is intimately related to the leopard and feline skins the women were wearing. They were enacting rites we see in shamanic practices worldwide: becoming the animals they worshipped, in habiting a wild mind, and participating intimately in animal appetites in order to obtain spiritual wisdom deeply rooted in the ecosystems. We delight in Ovid’s palatable poetic treatments of transmogrification. What is it about the maenad’s metamorphosis into lionesses that is so frightening?” – pg 63

“I’m not sure what the answer is, but I think by studying the invasive species in our local ecologies we can learn about subversive revolutionary tactics. What does it mean to digest a building? What if revolution involved sinking our hands into fresh loam and feeling for the threads of mycorrhizal fungi connecting plants and trees? What if, before we began to fight, we rooted back into our earth-based pleasure? We learn how to revolt when we make medicines from invasives and when we look curiously at what the land is doing, rather than immediately trying to ‘cure’ it or clean it up. What does it mean to transform a polluted landscape into a healthy forest? The landscape knows better than us and will show us if we look closely enough.” – pg 67

“The writing is clean and convincing. Society and purity are prized over darkness and uncertainty. Eloquence, that loaded word used to silence those who speak differently than the educated elite, is the hero’s gift, and a battle through linear time is his story.

Campbell’s theory of the monomyth was convincing enough that, although it faced much criticism, the hero’s journey has infiltrated the very pitch of our literature, our entertainment, and our psychological narratives. Even sperm have been transformed into little questing knights, journeying through the dark forest of the cervix until they can fertilize the egg, epitomized by Campbell’s idea of key episodes common to all hero narratives: ‘meeting the goddess’ and ‘woman as temptress.’

But the hero’s journey isn’t always the best fit. Contrary to popular belief, eggs are the dominant force when it comes to fertilization, actively choosing which sperm they will attract and allow implant. Now that we know better, what does the egg’s story sound like? What does it feel like to stand still and replete in your power to choose, not running off into the forest to slay dragons?” – pg 96

“The sight of a coppiced tree has always twinkled in my poet’s mind, reminding me that we are never limited to a binary, never stuck to one ‘tree’ or one course of action. Sometimes we need to cut down the tree of a monomythic idea in order to get to the more generative roots belowground that will spring into a polyphony of trunks aboveground. I’m not saying we need to throw out the hero’s journey. But we do need a biodiversity of stories. We need multiple sprouts from one trunk. We need stories that don’t center around human beings. And we need stories that do center around human beings. This is an invitation to cut back our ideas of linear progress and battle. To soften into the yellow sap of our stump for a moment. And then to being talking and singing and sprouting into as many stories as there are spores on the wind, bacteria in our gut, unsung loves in the forgotten corner of our feral hearts.

I am gifting all seventy-eight carts of the tarot to the masculine. That’s seventy-eight new nourishing archetypes…” pg 100

“Although I began my studies through the lens of the Divine Feminine, I find it no longer big enough for me. The opposite of patriarchy is not matriarchy. The opposite of civilization is not an idealized return to Paleolithic hunting and gathering. The opposite of a human is not an animal or a rock or a blade of grass. The opposite of our current predicament—climate collapse, social unrest, extinction, mass migrations, solastalgia, genocide—is, in fact, that disintegration of opposites altogether.

Everything is both. And more. And everything is penetratingly, painfully, wildly alive.” -pg 113

‘What if the dying, resurrecting god was not as natural a story as we’ve been led to believe? What if it didn’t so easily echo with ‘the return of spring’? There seems to be something deeply naïve about assuming that the god will resurrect. How many times can we gore a lover, send him to the underworld, castrate him, before he says, “Enough, already. I don’t want to come back.”

What I want to say, loudly, forcefully, is this: It is only initiation if you survive. And many do not survive. The way we live produces suffering, both our own and the suffering of others. It is only nature that our myths have sought to justify this suffering as sacred initiation or the only ground for rebirth and transformation. ON a personal scale we defend our addictions with stories. On a larger scale we defend our addiction to violence with violent mythologies.’ -pg 141

‘We are neither totally responsible for our current climatological crisis nor totally blameless. This is a call to mediate on the small cats of eucatastrophe that we can enact in our own lives. Noticing a possum, hit by a car, still alive and bringing it to a wildlife rehabilitator constitutes a eucatastrophe. Allowing a front lawn to run wild with milkweed and goldenrod and clover amounts to a eucatastrophe for struggling bee populations. Nothing that a friend isn’t returning calls and stopping by to check on them is a eucatastrophe. Protecting old-growth forests from logging is a eucatastrophe.’ -pg 147

‘Dionysus is a bull god. A grape god. A leopard god. The god of women. The god of androgyny and play. The god of ivy and invasive species… He is born three times. He is firstborn. He is various. And the Dionysian myths that survive accentuate this slipperiness. Dionysus disrupts our desire for a discrete, individual narrative that follows that arrow of time forward. He is immediately mycelial in his birth stories, branching off in many different directions from a variety of parents and locations…Semele is destroyed mid pregnancy by the cosmic power of Zeus. Despondent, Zeus gestates the zygote Dionysus in his own thigh.

Dionysus, then, is born of man and woman. He is a blend of genders from the start, and also of elements and cultures, so it is no surprise when legends tell us he is born with bull horns or turned into a baby goat.’ -pg 36-38

‘Dionysus was also popularly called Liber. In fact, this version of the vegetal god’s name is the root of our words for freedom and liberation and deliverance. Why, then, do we only think of Dionysus as a god of drunken foolishness? His worshippers very clearly saw him as a god of revolution and independence. Mythically, his arrivals signaled the inversion of social norms and the blooming of unfettered, uncivilized celebration, often conducted by society’s underdogs. This behavior isn’t just fermented ecstasy. This is spontaneous, unruly revolt.’

‘Put simply, maenads are women who know they aren’t different from the natural world. They are its poetic, feral creations. And thus, they are women reunited with older spiritual and ritualistic traditions that acknowledged their power. This is one of the reasons Dionysus was increasingly seen as a dangerous god by Roman authorities. I tis one of the main reasons he has been discredited as a drunken fool. Dionysus is not just the god of wine. He is the god of women. He comes to honor the maidens and the mothers and to reconnect them to a mythic mycelium that predates the rise of domination hierarchies during the Iron Age. He “crowns” them like he crowns Ariadne, returning to them their ecologically situated mystical authority that last fruited on Crete.’ – pg 63

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GABBLER RECOMMENDS: The Future of Ghosts

Posted on November 6, 2023 by blablablaandgabbler

A ghost is the spirit of a dead person. An avatar is a digital twin of a living person. Neither is “real.” A haunted metaverse. Why not?

In a sense, the Plato sense, materialism is about the hard copy. It is impressive. But it is still a copy.

In other words, we are living in Toytown, and we mistake the substance for the shadow. The substance isn’t what we can touch and feel—and we know we are not actually touching or feeling anything; that’s an illusion. Substance may not be material at all.

Shakespeare put it this way, in sonnet 53: “What is your substance, whereof are you made / That millions of strange shadows on you tend?”

I don’t want to get into Shakespeare’s Neoplatonism here—which is what those lines swirl around—but I do want to get into the fact that computing power and AI have left multimillions of us wondering what is real, in the old-fashioned sense of the word. This will only get faster and stranger as we enter the metaverse; a virtual world with digital twins in our world—or the other way ’round, if you prefer.

“What is your substance, whereof are you made?” This could be addressed to a human. Or a transhuman. Or a post-human. Or an avatar. Or a ghost.”

[Via]

BUT WHAT IF I, the writer, don’t matter? I joined a Slack channel for people using Sudowrite and scrolled through the comments. One caught my eye, posted by a mother who didn’t like the bookstore options for stories to read to her little boy. She was using the product to compose her own adventure tale for him. Maybe, I realized, these products that are supposedly built for writers will actually be of more interest to readers.

I can imagine a world in which many of the people employed as authors, people like me, limit their use of AI or decline to use it altogether. I can also imagine a world—and maybe we’re already in it—in which a new generation of readers begins using AI to produce the stories they want. If this type of literature satisfies readers, the question of whether it can match human-produced writing might well be judged irrelevant.

When I told Sims about this mother, he mentioned Roland Barthes’ influential essay “The Death of the Author.” In it, Barthes lays out an argument for favoring readers’ interpretations of a piece of writing over whatever meaning the author might have intended. Sims proposed a sort of supercharged version of Barthes’ argument in which a reader, able to produce not only a text’s meaning but the text itself, takes on an even more powerful cultural role.

Sims thought AI would let any literature lover generate the narrative they want—specifying the plot, the characters, even the writing style—instead of hoping someone else will.

Sims’ prediction made sense to me on an intellectual level, but I wondered how many people would actually want to cocreate their own literature. Then, a week later, I opened WhatsApp and saw a message from my dad, who grows mangoes in his yard in the coastal Florida town of Merritt Island. It was a picture he’d taken of his computer screen, with these words:

Sweet golden mango,
Merritt Island’s delight,
Juice drips, pure delight.

Next to this was ChatGPT’s logo and, underneath, a note: “My Haiku poem!”

The poem belonged to my dad in two senses: He had brought it into existence and was in possession of it. I stared at it for a while, trying to assess whether it was a good haiku—whether the doubling of the word “delight” was ungainly or subversive. I couldn’t decide. But then, my opinion didn’t matter. The literary relationship was a closed loop between my dad and himself.

In the days after the Sudowrite pile-on, those who had been helping to test its novel generator—hobbyists, fan fiction writers, and a handful of published genre authors—huddled on the Sudowrite Slack, feeling attacked. The outrage by published authors struck them as classist and exclusionary, maybe even ableist. Elizabeth Ann West, an author on Sudowrite’s payroll at the time who also makes a living writing Pride and Prejudice spinoffs, wrote, “Well I am PROUD to be a criminal against the arts if it means now everyone, of all abilities, can write the book they’ve always dreamed of writing.”

It reminded me of something Sims had told me. “Storytelling is really important,” he’d said. “This is an opportunity for us all to become storytellers.” The words had stuck with me. They suggested a democratization of creative freedom. There was something genuinely exciting about that prospect. But this line of reasoning obscured something fundamental about AI’s creation.

As much as technologists might be driven by an intellectual and creative curiosity similar to that of writers—and I don’t doubt this of Sims and others—the difference between them and us is that their work is expensive. The existence of language-generating AI depends on huge amounts of computational power and special hardware that only the world’s wealthiest people and institutions can afford. Whatever the creative goals of technologists, their research depends on that funding.

The language of empowerment, in that context, starts to sound familiar. It’s not unlike Facebook’s mission to “give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together,” or Google’s vision of making the world’s information “universally accessible and useful.” If AI constitutes a dramatic technical leap—and I believe it does—then, judging from history, it will also constitute a dramatic leap in corporate capture of human existence. Big Tech has already transmuted some of the most ancient pillars of human relationships—friendship, community, influence—for its own profit. Now it’s coming after language itself.

…

A thought experiment occurred to me at some point, a way to disentangle AI’s creative potential from its commercial potential: What if a band of diverse, anti-capitalist writers and developers got together and created their own language model, trained only on words provided with the explicit consent of the authors for the sole purpose of using the model as a creative tool?

That is, what if you could build an AI model that elegantly sidestepped all the ethical problems that seem inherent to AI: the lack of consent in training, the reinforcement of bias, the poorly paid gig workforce supporting it, the cheapening of artists’ labor? I imagined how rich and beautiful a model like this could be. I fantasized about the emergence of new forms of communal creative expression through human interaction with this model.